Playing with the Color Visualizer

Sherwin Williams is opening a new store in our neighborhood and offering 40% off on all paint. Even though I am not planning to repaint my living room anytime soon, it did get me thinking about changing the color.

Don’t get my wrong. I love the color it is now. We wanted something warm and cozy for our Portland gray days so we took a brown egg into the paint store and asked them to color match it. Who knew that brown eggs were really the same color as a terra cotta pot?

Round One

Just for fun, I thought I would try the Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer. You can play with the photos they have in stock or you can upload photos of your own. I decided to see if I might like a cooler color on my living room walls.

After taking a photo and uploading it to their site, I spent some time going through the demo (highly recommended since the program is not as intuitive as it could be) and then masking just the walls so that I could play with new colors. I found out the hard way that you need to be registered to save your favorites. Oops. There is probably a way to not lose the image but I didn’t figure it out so I had to register and then start from scratch.

I also discovered that when you are done masking a surface and hit the “continue” button, you then have to select a description before trying to save it. After a number of failed attempts at downloading my scenes  – here are a few of the results.

A dark gray green? Maybe. But I need to get rid of the pinkish cast on the ceiling from the reflected color of the terra cotta walls in order to really see it.

A dark gray blue? Whoa. That would ultra dark and cozy. But I kind of like it.

A light gray green? Yuck!

A yellow green? Nice contrast to all the red and wood. But I’d need to get a different rug. And different art.

Round Two.

I could have kept going but then I started to think about using the program for something else entirely. Why not try various colors on a photo of a painting instead of a room? I knew squares would be easiest so I uploaded the Albers image from the last post.

Replacing the colors using the rectangular masking and erasing tools was easy after I got the hang of it. (I do wish there was an easy way to do curves so that I could juggle some of my jewelry designs!)

Compare the new version above to the original on the right. I replaced a bunch of the blues and some of the reds with olive green.

Round Three

Next I cropped the image to just the four squares on the lower right and kept on playing. It will take a few more tries to get the colors I like but, just like in real life, the possibilities are endless.